yup, i saw the systemd-nspawn bulshit. Let's reinvent the wheel. fsmithred is a friendly guy, but there really is nothing new about it.unified is the keyword, i guess. Well: not my thing. Do one thing, do it well.

For the raspbery pi i was not in the mood to fiddle, so to me it looked more easy to upgrade old-old-stable to old-stable to stable. Worked without a single problem. So that is still something debian is doing pretty well. It seems.

I only feel a bit dirty if i say it somewhere. As if i would need an excuse ..working around systemd gets more and more painful, More problems to be found too. debian gave up on the powerpc (probably on hurd and kFreeBSD too), so it probably won't last that long anyway. all BSD's look good to me. Linux in general looks like a huge mess.

nodir wrote:all BSD's look good to me. Linux in general looks like a huge mess.

To me it still seems possible to build your own GNU/Linux OS using what's provided, just that most "mainstream" distributions have obviously headed in a direction which some will not like.

The *BSDs at least keep things a lot more UNIX like, but you can install a lot of the same old shit from ports which is installed on a given Linux distribution.

The end result is then often the same (but of course one gets to brag on Linux fan sites that one runs "BSD" ).

When it comes to "what went wrong" with Linux, it's that tired old analogy of "VHS vs Betamax" again - the best standard/product/implementation doesn't necessarily always come through. Shit can and often does become the de facto standard. There are too many examples of this to list. systemd is just one example of complex and and poorly designed crap replacing "old" (but robust) solutions via an "order out of chaos" approach. Many just don't want to admit that they have abandoned their principles and decided to use crap. They will snort derisively at MS Windows, but they will ignore the big festering pile of crap right under their noses.

But when all is said and done, Linux has become all about big business, there is far too much corporate involvement, money and influence to ignore without being exceptionally naive and from a business perspective systemd really only affects big players such as Red Hat, SUSE (Micro Focus International) and Canonical, etc - any other distributions and their users just don't matter. The overwhelming majority of "Linux" is android and that's not affected. We know from decades of experience that the corporate world doesn't care about code quality or robustness, in a for profit industry, software is obviously not a labour of love.

(sorry, last two paragraphs amount to me just rambling away to myself...)

So, I suppose it still boils down to us just using and adapting the free stuff which is available to us. The more non-mainstream our requirements, the more work we have to do to get what we want.

I had a lot of success with and positive memories of Slackware. If I had to go back to Linux, it would be that. I "abandoned" it in the course of experimenting with the *BSDs, got used to the *BSDs and now find Linux to be the unfamiliar system...

Sounds right to me. Though, as already said elsewhere, i don't really care much about the big picture anymore. I want an OS which i like (or at least can bare). Probably: regarding FreeBSD, of which i have seen the most of that crew, it rather a feeling. It seems to make sense. It seems as if you wanted to, you could understand the overall picture. Besides it really runs nice on my old hardware. My daily ride is a terminal-emulator, sometimes gnu screen, vim, a small webbrowser (either dillo or netsurf, if needed midori) and sometimes a mail-client. Sure: There is no difference using BSD like OS or Linux like OS regarding that.

Regarding the small linux distros which may still do well: Right now i look at Void. I like it, and will probably stick to it. It uses runit as the initsystem, which is straight forward (it neither comes with an audio-player nor does it let you do a chroot though). runit was the init system of dragora2 too, but i didn't do much with it then (same for slackware, i was simply busy with getting used to non-debian ways of packagemanagement). So now i got a chance to speak about the alpha release of dragora3. While it really is alpha, barebones, i got a chance to see how minimal and simple a system may. Comes with perp as init, musl instead of glibc and mksh instead of bash). Would be my favorite if i was able to troubleshoot compiling erros.I will leave FreeBSD on the other PC and have a look now and then. tiny core linux was fun adelie looks good, perhaps i will give it a chance on the powerpc. There is alpine, or such, but i don't know more.

Mhh .. what did i want to say? Perhaps: i am looking for things as easy as possible. It might be there are still options using linux if one wants that, but i don't hold my breath.

Yes and No, but rather no than yes, as to control you wil use perpctl, etc. You could also say openrc is sysv, iirc.ls -l /sbin/init isn't very reliable, btw (it is as long you know in advance you either run sysv or systemd)

nodir wrote:Yes and No, but rather no than yes, as to control you wil use perpctl, etc. You could also say openrc is sysv, iirc.ls -l /sbin/init isn't very reliable, btw (it is as long you know in advance you either run sysv or systemd)

Ah yes, I see what you mean, thank you for the clarification — I will have to boot it again and do some more digging...

On Alpine, /sbin/init is symlinked to busybox but it can be re-linked to /sbin/openrc-init, to make this work the (a)gettys have to be started explicitly:

It confused me quite a bit that on the one hand you speak of sysv being a dinosaur, loving systemd, etc, and on the other hand prefer alpine as distro which uses busybox. I only ran in busybox with tiny core linux though, so can't say that much about it. Perhaps i see it wrong. But it doesn't seem that consistent to me (not that it would matter, of course. To each his own).

I don't love systemd at all, I find it too complicated and I think that the attack surface exposed by the insanely large code base is far too big for my liking — this is why I don't have a trace of systemd on my own laptop.

It is true though that I don't hate systemd and I do find it's features useful and it's user space integration pleasing, this is why I am comfortable running it on the family laptop.

I find sysvinit too complicated and too large in the same way as systemd but it has no added functionality to compensate for this, AFAICT.